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Composing GRACE: Interview with Austin Wintory By Heather Wixson Generally, horror film scores don’t really do much to distinguish themselves within the genre. That’s why composer Austin Wintory just knew when he started working on the score for GRACE that he needed to do something different. “I generally think of horror movie scores as ‘vacuum cleaner’ scores,” said Wintory. “Lately, the trend has been where they just sound grungy or noisy and I wanted GRACE to sound distinctive and refreshing.” Wintory fell in love with movie soundtracks around the age of 10 when he started taking piano lessons. Rather than getting stuck with the average “by the books” piano teacher, Wintory was lucky that his teacher had a different approach and soon began introducing him to the art of movie scores. “At that point in my life, music wasn’t really important,” explained Wintory. “But then my teacher played me Jerry Goldsmith’s scores for PATTON and A PATCH OF BLUE, and I was instantly hooked.” Wintory met GRACE director Paul Solet after he moved from New York to Los Angeles and the two were instant friends. When Solet needed mood reel music for GRACE, he went to Wintory who gave the song “Amazing Grace” a haunting twist through the use of bag pipes. Interestingly enough, that idea didn’t even get used when scoring the actual film of GRACE. Wintory decided to go in a completely different direction. “My ideas for GRACE evolved a lot from when I knew I was going to get to work on the film to the time when I actually started on it,” said Wintory. “What was great about the process for me was that Paul was specific in what he needed for GRACE, but he was very hands-off. He completely loosened the reigns for me so that I wouldn’t hold back anything creatively and that’s very atypical of most directors.” Wintory studied the script of GRACE inside and out so that he could compose a lot of the music based on the different character’s points of view. “Madeline, Grace’s mother, basically has this internal breakdown during the course of movie,” explained Wintory. “Rather that do something elaborate or over-dramatic, I wanted the music to reflect how internal the process was for her so I made some very emotionally intense music to demonstrate this. So, the end result is very quiet and subtle.” Wintory also wanted to reflect the themes of maternal instincts and babies in the music of GRACE, so used some unusual every day sounds when scoring the film. “I created a library of sounds to use throughout the film that don’t generally get used in creating a movie score,” said Wintory. “One of my engineers recently had a baby so I had him take a digital recorder home and just record any possible sound his child made so I could use them later. It’s amazing what kind of alien sounds can come out of a baby. Keeping with the theme of babies, we also recorded sounds from different toddler instruments that my mom picked up one day.” "Since there was the theme of death and waste in GRACE, the mixer for the film (Brett Hinton) visited a horse farm and recorded all different types of "fly sounds"- from a single fly buzzing to swarms of flies, and when you isolate those buzzing sounds, it's just very unnerving," added Wintory. To demonstrate a conflict between the main characters of Madeline and Vivian (her mother-in-law), Wintory used a contrast of instruments with a cello for Madeline and a violin for Vivian. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule for Wintory that each instrument could only be used for each character; he just used their general sounds as a representation of different viewpoints within the film. In order to add some dramatic flair to GRACE’s score (especially since the last 20 minutes of film features nonstop music), Wintory knew that he needed to do something powerful and extraordinary. “We decided we needed to get eight bass and contrabass clarinets all together to record the final piece for GRACE but it wasn’t something we were sure we would be able to do,” discussed Wintory. “Somehow, the stars aligned and we got all of these musicians together in the very same studio The Beatles used in Abbey Road and we ended up doing an internet recording session. It was simply an amazing experience for me as a composer and the result was very powerful to hear.” “You can just tell by watching GRACE that this movie is so special and a labor of love for everyone involved,” added Wintory. “Paul has such a high level of commitment to this film that I just knew I owed it to him to create something special and hopefully those who see it will realize just how much we all really loved working on such an amazing project.” |
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